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Mohammed Hussain
College of Technological Innovation
Zayed University
Dubai, UAE, P.O. Box 19282
mohammed.hussain@zu.ac.ae
Abstract —
Many educational institutions enforce
attendance policies, where students are expected to have their
absences below a certain percentage in each class. Attendance
records are collected to enforce such policies, but they are rarely
utilized for anything else. In this paper, we investigate the value
of analyzing the records pulled from student attendance
systems. We apply a data mining technique, the market basket
analysis, on student attendance data. The contribution of this
analysis is the identification of student groups who share highly
similar absence records. Such similarity may indicate that the
students are missing classes due to peer pressure, rather than
valid excuses. The presented method helps instructors and
advisors discover this behavior, which is more efficient than
relying on instructors, who may teach many classes. To
minimize the number of false alarms, student groups are ranked
based on their absence similarity. We tested our method by
analyzing student attendance data for over two thousand
students for one semester at a public higher education
institution. The results were helpful in identifying students with
miss classes due to their friends missing the classes.
Keywords –Educational data mining; Learning
analytics; Mining student behavior
I.
INTRODUCTION
Student advisors and counselors strive to ensure the
success of their students. Apart from advising students with
respect to courses they need to register for next the semester,
it is expected that advisors and counselors encourage students
to put more effort in their courses, motivate students to engage
in extracurricular activities and help students reflect on their
behavior. Instructors may help advisors by providing feedback
with regards to the performance of the advisees. The authors’
institution uses a system to keep track of student attendance.
The institution uses the system to enforce attendance, where
students are withdrawn from a course if they exceed a certain
number of absences. The system notifies advisors once their
students are in danger of being withdrawn from a course. The
system fails short from reporting the following behavior. Alice
and Bob are two students and they are classmate in a few
courses. Bob and Alice are also friends. Should Bob, skip a
class, Alice may feel pressured to skip that class. The same
may be true the other way around. This behavior may be
repeated a few times in each course, will amount to many
absences. However, their behavior will fly under the
attendance system radar, since they are skipping classes from
difference courses. Neither the instructor, nor the advisor will
suspect that one of the students is skipping the classes because
of peer pressure. Such behavior may result in students failing
their courses. This is a problem that remains unsolved and it
constitutes the problem addressed in this paper.
This research was funded through Zayed University Research
Incentive Fund R71068
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2019 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON)
Page 1198
Abdullah Hussein
Department of Computer Science
University of Sharjah
Sharjah, UAE, P.O. Box 27272
ahussein@sharjah.ac.ae
The research question investigated in this paper is the
value of analyzing student attendance records, which is
typically only collected to enforce attendance policies.
Specifically, would mining such data helps instructors and
advisors gain insights with regards to identifying students who
miss their classes due to peer pressure, as described earlier?
The importance of this work comes from the fact that the
number of students may reach tens of thousands in many
educational institutions. Thus, any meaningful insight, even if
it applies for a small percentage of students, will have a great
value.
This paper addresses the stated research question through
the field of educational data mining and learning analytics [1-
4]. Educational data mining and learning analytics have
gained a great attention as tools which provide valuable
insights to higher educational institutions through the analysis
of student data collected from the various IT systems.
Numerous papers have used data mining techniques to predict
student academic performance, engagement in classes and
preferences [5-10]. This work utilizes this field through the
application of a popular data mining technique, specifically
the market basked analysis, to analyze student data. Market
basket analysis is used in e-commerce, such as Amazon and
eBay, to analyze how frequently a group of products are
purchased together and to recommend products to customers.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II
discusses the background and related work on educational
data mining and learning analytics relevant to this paper.
Section III presents our method of analyzing student
attendance records, based on a market basket analysis. Section
IV illustrates the method through a case study involving the
attendance records of over two thousand students throughout
a semester, collected from the attendance system at the author
institution. Section V concludes the paper and presents the
current limitations and planned future work.
II. BACKGROUND
Students in higher educational institutions interact with
many systems, such as registration and learning management.
Mining student data collected from these systems helps
discover useful insights with respect to student behavior.
Researchers in the field of educational data mining and
learning analytics have already demonstrated that such data
can be used to predict student academic performance,
preferences and engagement [5-9] and [13-14].
A survey on the application of data mining methods to
achieve different educational purposes, such as the way the
input and output of the educational process affect each other
was presented in [4]. The survey describes the way different
research work on determining student failure/success rate in
 order to help students before they reached risk of failure, and
effective resource utilization and cost minimization were also
studied. The authors clustered the students based on their class
performance and overall attendance (low, medium and high).
This helped the authors in predicting the students’ graduation
performance in final year at university using only pre-
university marks and examination marks of early years at
university. The authors of [5] Studied the effect of student
class attendance on their academic scores and registered a
significant relation between attendance and the academic
score. The study used the T-test to measure the relation
between the percentage of attendance and the percentage score
of the students. A survey on the application of data mining in
learning management systems is presented in [6]. The survey
describes the way each step of the data mining process is
applied to the field of e-learning, from preprocessing to
interpreting results. The survey focused on the open-source
Modular Object-Oriented Development Learning
Environment (MOODLE) as the source of the educational
data.
The authors of [7] extracted knowledge that describes
students’ performance in end semester examination to help in
identifying the dropouts and students who need special
attention. A study to identify patterns of interaction between
the students is proposed by [8]. The study related these
patterns to student performance. A case study was presented
where students were trained on use of the Internet to
accomplish education-related tasks. By monitoring the
student’s communications solving the difficulties that arose,
the course instructors searched for patterns of interaction and
related these patterns to student performance and final course
grades. As the prediction of student performance, early in the
course, is vital to student success, the authors of [9] presented
an approach to evaluate student data and predict the student
performance in courses during their early period of study.
Students were asked to fill a questionnaire which include
questions related to several personal, socio-economic,
psychological, school and college related variables that were
expected to affect student performance. The authors then built
data mining models based on the data collected from the
questionnaire.
Learning analytics is an essential component for
leveraging the benefits of big data [10] in educational
contexts. The challenges and opportunities of big data for
educational institutions are studied in [11-12]. The authors of
[13] presented a method to enhance the academic
accreditation process through the application of big data. The
method analyzes assessment tools and learning outcomes and
helps educators in aligning assessment with outcomes. A
method to identify student utilization of campus facilities
through tracking student access to campus wireless networks
was presented in [14].
A common approach among the educational data mining
literature described earlier [5-8] is the use of student
attendance, performance in assessment and interaction with
learning resources to predict student performance and
success. Student attendance is modeled as a qualitative value,
such as low, average and high attendance. This paper utilizes
the actual attendance records. Using the actual records allows
us to utilize more data mining techniques, such as the market
basket analysis used in this paper. Further, existing literature
does not help in finding groups of students who share a very
similar attendance records across different classes, which
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2019 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON)
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class attendance
Attendance
Instructor
System
se t
ata
ed
nc
da
en
att
absence rules
Learning
Analytics Advisor
Fig. 1. The system architecture
may signify missing classes due to peer pressure. The next
section describes the presented method for finding patterns
within student attendance records.
III. METHOD
We propose a method that utilizes the attendance records
for all students. The collected data is then passed to a data
mining technique for analysis. Specifically, the method mines
the records for association rules, where each rule links the
absences of one student to the absences of one or more
students. The method makes use of the market basket analysis
[15], which is a data mining technique that retailers, such as
Amazon and eBay use to find associations between their
products. Retailers generate association rules by inspecting
their transactions and finding items that frequently appear
together. For example, the following rule may be used by a
retailer recommender system.
{Gaming_Console, Motion_Detector} ⇒ {Motion_Game}
The rule states that if a customer buys a certain gaming
console, as well as that console’s motion detector, then the
customer will likely to buy a motion-based game, such as a
dancing game. The set of the two items, Gaming_Console and
Motion_Detector, represents the left side of the association
rule, whereas the set of one item, Motion_Game, represents
the right side of the rule. Such rules help retailers recommend
products to customers. A popular algorithm to generate
association rules is the apriori algorithm [16].
In our work, we use the apriori algorithm to find rules
associating the absences of one student to the absences of one
or more students. The generated rules help instructors and
advisors identify students who are frequently absent together.
Instructors and advisors may meet with such students to
investigate the reason behind this behavior. Such intervention
supports student academic success. Please refer to Fig. 1,
which illustrates the proposed method. The next subsection
defines the necessary terminology for the apriori algorithm.
Please refer to [16] for the exact algorithm.
A.
The Apriori Algorithm
The apriori algorithm works on transactional datasets
where each row represents a transaction consists of a set of
items. Table I shows an example of a dataset of five
transactions. Consider the set of available items for purchase,
gaming consoles, controllers, virtual reality sets, virtual reality
 TABLE I SAMPLE TRANSACTION DATASET

Trans Items
1 Gaming_Console, VR_Set, VR_Game
2 Gaming_Console, Controller, Action_Game, Online_Pass
3 VR_Set, VR_Game
4 Gaming_Console, Action_Game, Online_Pass
5 VR_Set, VR_Game, Controller

TABLE II. Sample Anonymized Student Absence Rules

Student1 Student2 Student3 Student4 … Studentn

CS101_1_Jan7 0 0 0 0 … 1
CS101_1_Jan7 1 0 0 1 … 0
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
PH215_3_May9 1 0 1 0 … 0
PH215_3_May9 0 0 0 1 … 1

games, action games and online passes. There are two

important values that need to be calculated for each
association rule. They are the rule’s support and confidence
values. First, let us define the support for a set of items. The
support of a set is the number of transactions containing that
all of that set items. The support may also be expressed as the
ratio of the number transactions containing all the items in that
set, to the number of all transactions in the dataset; that is, we
may express the support as a percentage. Please refer to
formula (1) below.
 #$ "

! #% &%&$

(2)
! # $
To identify and generate association rules on large
datasets, with thousands of items, the apriori algorithm look
for rules that meets a certain support threshold, as well as a
certain confidence threshold. The next subsection discusses
the application of apriori in mining the attendance records,
which is the main contribution of this paper.

!

 
 


 #$ "

!

 
Similarly, the support of a rule is the number of
transactions containing the items of that rule left, as well as
right-side set items. The confidence of an association rule (left
side ⇒ right side) is calculated as the ratio of the support of
the union between the left-side and right-side sets to the
support of the left side set. Rules with higher confidence and
support signify that if the customer is showing interest in the
items of the left-side set, then there is a high probability that
the customer will show interest in the items of the right-side
set.
It is clear from the table that all transactions containing a
VR_Set also contain a VR_Game. This observation provides a
rule R1: {VR_Set} ⇒ {VR_Game}. Most of the transactions
containing a Gaming_Console also contains an Online_Pass.
The observation provides us with a second rule R2:
{Gaming_Console} ⇒ {Online_Pass}. More rules can be
also extracted. The confidence for R1 is calculated as 1, using
formula (1). The confidence for R2 is calculated as 0.67, using
a similar calculation. The support for R1 is 3 (number of
transactions containing both VR_Set and VR_Game). The
support for R2 is 2 (number of transactions containing both
Gaming_Console and Online_Pass). Both the support and
confidence are important values that reflect the usefulness of
the rule.
B.
Mining Attendance Records with Apriori
(1) Products bought together, by one customer, comprise one
transaction. Rather than dealing with transactions and
products, this paper applies the apriori algorithm on students’
absence records. The rules we generate have a structure
similar to the example rule below. The rule states that if
StudentA and StudentB are absent, then StudentC will likely be
absent too. The assumption here is that the three students are
missing the same class on the same date. Students who miss
the same class on the same date comprise one transaction.
{StudentA, StudentB} ⇒ {StudentC}
The following is a brief description of the steps to perform the
apriori on student absence records and the meaningful use of
the algorithm output.
Step 1.
The first step is to collect the absence records for
each student in each class. A list of student ids needs
to be extracted, Stu_IDs. Similarly, a list of
classes/sections needs to be extracted, Sec_IDs, such
as CS101_3.
Step 2.
For each section, extract the dates where that
section had a session and the instructor of that section
recorded the attendance. Append the Sec_ID to each
date, creating a list of dates for each section,
Sec_ID_Date_IDs. For example, if section CS101_3
had a session on Apr 12th, then CS101_Apr12 is
created. This is repeated for each section to create a
list of lists, Master_Sec_Date_List. Example
element of Master_Sec_Date_List is

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 TABLE III. Sample Anonymized Student Absence Rules
R# Left ⇒ Support Confidence
Right % %
1 {n} ⇒ {m} 0.01077 1.00
3 {g} ⇒ {f} 0.01197 0.77
5 {f} => {g} 0.01197 0.91
7 {z, x}=> {y} 0.01077 0.90
9 {j} => {k} 0.01437 0.85
11 {δ} => {z} 0.01557 0.86
13 {α} => {β} 0.01677 0.74
15 {x} => {w} 0.01916 0.80
CS101_3_Apr12, where CS101_3 is the section id
and Apr12 is the date of one of the sessions. Each
element of Master_Sec_Date_List is therefore a
transaction label.
Step 3.
Create a matrix where the rows represent the
elements of Master_Sec_Date_List ids and the
columns represent the student ids. The celli,j in
created matrix represents whether student, j, was
present (1) or absent (0) during session i (note that i
is composed of a section id and a date id). Table II is
an illustration of the transaction matrix that we
supply to the apriori algorithm. The second row
shows that student1 was absent along with student4
on Jan 7th in section CS101_1.
Step 4.
Fill the matrix created in Step 3 with student
absence values based on the records pulled from the
attendance system.
Step 5.
Run the apriori algorithm on the computed matrix
from Step 4. The support and confidence thresholds
need to be specified. The support threshold is based
on the number of sessions. If a student takes 5
courses in a semester, where each section holds 30
sessions throughout the semester, then the maximum
number of sessions is 150. Consider two students
having an exact class schedule, the maximum
number of times both are absent is 150. However, it
is highly unlikely that a student misses all of
sessions, in all of the classes. Therefore, one may set
the support threshold a reasonable value. For
example, a threshold of 10 help generate association
rules, where each rule is supported by 10 incidents
were the two students were absent together. The
confidence threshold is based on the required rule
strength. Setting the threshold to 0.7 help generate
rules, where each rule associates the absence of one
student to another with 70% accuracy. Setting the
support and confidence thresholds also depends on
the number of rules the user is willing to go through.
The lower the thresholds, the more rules the apriori
generates.
Step 6.
The output of the apriori algorithm is a set of rules
that meets the thresholds set in Step 5. If a student
appears in a rule, then the advisor of that student may
receive a notification with regards to that rule. An
example output is displayed in Table III. Table III
lists a set of the actual anonymized rules generated
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R# Left ⇒ Right Support Confidence
2 {l, k} ⇒ {j} 0.01197 1.00
4 {j, l} ⇒ {k} 0.01197 1.00
6 {q, s} => {r} 0.01197 1.00
8 {r} => {s} 0.01677 0.90
10 {γ} => {ε} 0.01317 0.85
12 {y} => {w} 0.01437 0.80
14 {j} => {l} 0.01197 0.71
16 {x} => {y} 0.01677 0.70
based on the attendance records collected from the
author institution. The experiment detail is explained
the next section.
Step 7.
The advisor needs to investigate the rules. Note that
some rules may be the result of students
coincidentally missing classes, without peer
pressure. The advisor may check on the student
overall performance to set the priority for meeting
students. Students who miss classes and are under
probation needs urgent attention, compared to
students with good standing status.
Step 8.
Finally, advisors provide feedback for the person
responsible for generating the rules with regards to
the usefulness of the generated rules. The feedback
helps tweak the support and confidence thresholds
for the next rounds.
IV. EXPERIMENT
To demonstrate the presented method, we analyzed the
attendance records of more than 2000 students, over the period
of one semester at the author’s institution. The apriori
algorithm was applied to perform the basket analysis. The
authors implemented their approach using R programming
language [17], a popular data mining software environment.
The following is a summary of the data collection, analysis
and results of the experiment.
A.
Data Collection and Preprocessing
The authors collected more than 50,000 absence records,
where each record documents the absence of a student with
respect to a class. Each record in the collected attendance data
consists of the following items. The St_ID is the student id,
C_ID, is the course id, Sec_ID is the section id and A_ Date is
the date of the absence:
Recordi = (St_ID, C_ID, Sec_ID, A_ Date)
The records were then preprocessed to remove the first and
last week of classes. The rationale is to avoid the collection of
absence records for the days in which many students are
absent. At the first week, students are busy with add and drop,
while at the last week, many student miss classes to prepare
for assessment. The authors also preprocessed the records for
students who change sections. An attendance matrix was
generated for each section, where rows represent the dates that
section had a session and columns represent the students
registered in that section, i.e., the class roaster.
 Fig. 2. A Graph of the Anonymized Rules – the weight of an edge is the support of the rule
B.
Analysis and Results
The steps 1 to 8 from the Section III.B were followed to
mine the collected data for association rules. The selected
thresholds were support = 0.0001, around 5 transactions, and
confidence = 0.25. We used R Studio1, an open-source IDE
for R, to perform the analysis.
As described earlier, the apriori algorithm generates rules
in the following structure: (left ⇒ right: support, confidence),
where left refers to the left-hand side of the rule and right is
the right-hand side of the rule. Both left and right denote a set
of one or more students, where the arrow between them
denotes that if left is absent, then right is absent too. The
support is the percentage of records where both students were
found to be absent together. The confidence is the percentage
of students in the left being absent, with students in the right
being absent too. Table III lists a number of rules, where
actual student ids were replaced with random letters to ensure
anonymity. A support of 0.01078% translates to around 5
absences in our dataset. A confidence of 1 means that student
in the right side of a rule is always absent if student in the left
side of that rule is absent. The results of the analysis helped
us identify over 100 pairs of students who share similar
absence records. A likely cause is one student in each pair is
may be skipping classes because his or her friend is absent.
1
RStudio: https://www.rstudio.com
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2019 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON)
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These observations should help advisors and instructors in
identifying such cases of absences as early as possible.
To visualize the results, the authors plotted the rules as a
graph, where students are nodes. The edges represent the
absences two students share together in the same class,
weighted by the actual number of absences. Fig. 2 shows part
of the generated graph for this experiment. The letters that
appear in the graph represent the same students in Table III.
Interesting examples can be seen in the figure. For
example, consider the students l, k and j. They form a group,
in which if one is absent, the other is highly likely to be absent
too. The students α and β have 14 absences in common, which
is highly unlikely to be coincidental. Larger groups are also
found, such as the group of five students x, w, y, z and δ. The
student y appears at the center of that group. This may signify
that y is the leader of that group and that y has major influence
on the rest of the students.
V.
CONCLUSION
Student attendance systems, such as the one at the authors’
institution, keep absence records of each student for each of
his or her classes in each semester. The records are used for
enforcing attendance policies only to ensure students absences
do not exceed a certain threshold. Mining student attendance
 records can be useful for identifying student who miss classes
due to peer pressure. We investigated the value of analyzing
the records pulled from the student attendance system. We
presented a method that applies a market basket analysis,
using the apriori algorithm, on student attendance data. The
method was used to mine over 50,000 attendance records that
belong to over 2000 students at the author institution. The
method was successful in generating more than a 100
association rules. Each rule links the absences of one student
to the absences of one or more students.
The main limitation of this work is the fact that the method
needs a significant number of records to be able to generate
the rules. At least, half of the semester may pass before enough
absences can be recorded by class instructors. Nevertheless,
advisors may benefit from this approach to better advise
students for the next semester.
[14]
M. Hussain, M. B. Al-Mourad, A. Hussein, S. Mathew & E.
Morsy, “A novel approach for analyzing student interaction
with educational systems,” in Proc. of Global Engineering
Education Conference, pp. 1332-1336, 2017.
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M. J. Berry & G. Linoff, Data mining techniques: for
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K. Hornik, “R FAQ,” The Comprehensive R Archive Network.
2.1 What is R?, 2015, Retrieved 2019-01-13, from
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